The state’s bond rating, among the lowest in the nation, has dropped on Christie’s watch. The funds earmarked for transit projects and open space purchases are empty.

And the famous pension reform signed by Gov. Chris Christie baked in gigantic increases in payments to make up for the many years when previous governors shorted the fund altogether. That cost is scheduled to grow from $1.7 billion this year to nearly $5 billion in four years.

Thanks to all this, several academic studies rank New Jersey’s structural deficit among the highest in the nation, and a recent one from George Mason University placed us dead last.

In plain language, we are broke.

Cutting taxes now would be the moral equivalent of skipping a few mortgage payments to finance a vacation in Hawaii. It is crazy talk.

Christie has made two arguments in favor of tax cuts. Like many Republicans, he sees it as the key to creating jobs. So he signed broad business tax cuts when he took office and has since turbo-charged a separate program that subsidizes individual projects.

The results are in. It didn’t work.

New Jersey has recovered only 44 percent of the jobs it lost during the Great Recession, about half the national average. And this is not a regional problem.

There is more to improving the job climate, like good research universities and transportation systems and vocational training. Taxes pay for all that.

Most of the good pharmaceutical jobs New Jersey has lost in recent years moved to high-tax states, including Massachusetts and California. If taxes were the key to job growth, why didn’t they choose Mississippi?

The second argument in favor of a tax cut is more compelling, which is that New Jerseyans need relief.

And even there, Christie gets it wrong. His first preference is for a cut in the income tax, which would provide relief to those who need it least.

New Jersey’s income tax is steeply progressive, with the top 1 percent providing roughly 40 percent of the revenue. So cutting rates across the board, as Christie has proposed, would deliver 40 percent of the benefits to that top 1 percent.

That might seem perfectly fair at first glance. But what about the other tax burdens? The property tax and sales tax hit middle-class and working-poor families hard.

When you combine all state and local taxes, it turns out that New Jersey’s overall tax system is regressive. The bottom 20 percent pay 11.2 percent of their income in combined taxes. The richest 1 percent pay 7 percent.